It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.
Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and Devil Sent the Rain, a collection of his essays and journalism. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series Treme, a four-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in New Orleans, where he is at work on a new novel.View all by Tom Piazza
